1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to image processing, and specifically, a method and an apparatus for detecting a continuous road partition with a height.
2. Description of the Related Art
The driving assistance system is becoming more popular. The LDW/RDW (Lane/Road detection warning) system, a subsystem of the driving assistance system, can avoid collisions and help to determine driving directions accurately. A road or lane detection is very important for the LDW/RDW system, because only by knowing road information can a further process such as warning be performed. In general, a road or a lane is detected by detecting road partitions.
The road partitions include road shoulders, white lines, fences and other objects by which a road area and lanes can be identified. In the road partitions, there are continuous road partitions with a certain height such as fences, bushes and road shoulders.
With respect to the continuous road partitions, some detection methods have been disclosed.
For example, in the non-patent document 1 (“Vehicle and Guard Rail Detection Using Radar and Vision Data Fusion”, Giancarlo Alessandretti, Alberto Broggi, and Pietro Cerri, et al., IEEE 2007 TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS), a method for detecting a vehicle and a fence input by a combination of radar imaging and vision imaging is disclosed. The radar image assistance provides the material information which cannot be obtained from a gray scale image, so that the radar image assistance is helpful for realizing the detection of the vehicle and the fences. However, in this method, it is difficult to obtain a stable result in practical application and the computation amount is also very large, because of the change of environmental conditions and the visual geometrical distortion.
Therefore, there is a demand for providing a technology for detecting a continuous road partition with a height which has stability and accuracy, so that a high detection rate can be obtained even in a complex environment and the computation amount can be reduced remarkably.